


days and days and days

by superfluouskeys



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/F, F/M, Hawke at Skyhold, mentions hawke/isabela and hints at others
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-05
Updated: 2017-06-05
Packaged: 2018-11-09 14:16:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11106282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superfluouskeys/pseuds/superfluouskeys
Summary: Every time a birthday rolls around, Hawke counts the years on her fingers and lists a terrible mistake for each one.  She finds it particularly satisfying when she can match up mistakes with the years in which they occurred.Prompt response: "I've made so many mistakes, but you're not one of them."





	days and days and days

                **_I’ve made so many mistakes,  
                                but you’re not one of them_**

It's damn bone-chilling cold in Skyhold.  She's never spent much time anywhere so mountainous.  It gets a bit better during the day, but the nights are miserable.  All the old injuries Hawke once bribed her friends into patching up on the fly are acting up in response to every little hitch in the weather.  She's starting to feel like a grouchy old lady.  And to wish she'd perhaps been to see a proper medic once in awhile.

She's got a birthday coming up.  Maybe that's why she's feeling especially fatalistic.  Couldn't possibly be that the sky's torn open or she misses anyone in particular.  Those would be absurd reasons to be upset.  But every time a birthday rolls around, Hawke finds herself counting the years on her fingers and listing a terrible mistake for each one.  She finds it particularly satisfying when she can match up mistakes with the years in which they occurred.

"Why, Hawke," Varric says, somehow both flatly and with incredible warmth.  "What a surprise."

She's been inviting herself into his room every night since she's been here.  Somehow it's infinitely less cold in his bed than the one in the room they offered her.  Probably has a better blanket or something.

"How old are you, Varric?" she wonders idly.

Varric makes a gesture of mock-offense.  "Don't you know it's rude to ask a gentleman his age?"

"Humour me--you've got to have at least a few years on me, right?"  When Varric only snorts his disapproval, she adds, "In Kirkwall it was always a blur to me.  I'd have thought Merrill was still a teenager when we met, but did you know she's older than me?  On the other hand, I'd have thought Fenris had at least a few years on me, but we finally pieced together that we're almost the same age."

"No one would know your age if you didn't go whining about it once a year," Varric retorts pleasantly.

"I do not whine!"

"Mhm.  My point is," Varric approaches her to ruffle her hair, then resigns himself to his desk, "we're both still in our prime.  So there's no need to get all mopey about it."

"Tell that to my right knee," Hawke mutters.  As though in direct response, the wind howls outside.  She pulls Varric's covers more tightly around her shoulders, then repositions herself on the edge of the bed so that she can prod Varric's shoulder in comfort.  "So how old are you?"

Varric meets her gaze.  "Guess."

"Ninety."

"How dare you."

Hawke wrinkles her nose at him.  "One thousand."

Varric cracks a smile in spite of himself.  "You're thinking of Chuckles."

"Ah yes, the bald fellow with the air of mystery about him."

Varric pulls a face.  "Please don't seduce him."

Hawke's laughter almost surprises her.  It's like the muscles required for laughing have atrophied from lack of use.  "Hadn't intended to, but now that you mention it..." she teases.  "Anyway, you've gotten me off topic.  How am I to know the lifespan of an ancient dwarf?"

"Subtract about nine hundred fifty of those years and you'll be a lot closer."

"Forty....seven," Hawke guesses.

Varric taps her nose.

"That would have made you...my, but has it been nearly twelve years since we met, Varric?"  It's funny to think of Varric as being somewhere around the age she is now when they'd met.  She'd always assumed, as one does, that because he seemed a bit older and wiser, he knew what was going on, or was privy to some great secrets of the universe that came with age.

"Is that the deathroot anniversary?" Varric counters.

"No, no, must be the darkspawn blood anniversary."

"Oh, good--I've already got some genlock toes lying around somewhere."

"And here I didn't get you anything!  Don't suppose marigolds grow out here."

"No, but there's plenty of shitty copper in the armory."

"Oh, and I'm sure I saw a whole valley full of rams on my way out here!" Hawke flops back onto Varric's bed.  "Shall I send them to the Seneschal as my dowry?"

"Did I tell you about the time we went on a wild chase across the Hinterlands for this weird gold ram who turned out to be possessed by a demon?"

"You did not, but now that I know of him, I expect that's the only ram you'll accept in this business transaction."

"Naturally," Varric responds with a flourish of his hand.

They've always joked like this, right from the very start, but there was a very unfortunate period of time where Hawke was rather dreadfully enamoured of Varric.  She can't remember exactly when anymore.  The years she spent in Kirkwall feel like a particularly vivid dream, where the details switch places with each recollection, and the people have faded into mere echoes of their true selves, both more and less than they were in reality.  Hawke is the sort of person who develops crushes liberally and only pays them mind when they cause her grief.  She's fairly certain it started after something had gone poorly with someone else at some point, and she'd stormed over to the Hanged Man and cast herself upon Varric's bed to vent to him while he wrote, as she almost always did, and something he'd said had so stricken her that she'd seen him in an entirely new light.

The worst part--and, she likes to tell herself, the only reason she even remembers such a silly little crush--was that Varric was in love with someone else.  Hawke could delude herself into thinking perhaps her feelings had a chance of being returned when she heard the way Varric spoke of her to others, weaving wild tales of her charm and heroism, but Varric keeps Bianca (the person, not the crossbow) like a cherished secret, utterly private even from Hawke.  Once Hawke noticed this one small piece of him that lay forever out of her reach, she found cause to feel desperately jealous.

She got over it eventually, of course.  Probably.  Mostly.  But she's never quite managed to confess it to him.  Somehow, of all the painful memories from a similar time frame, that one still feels too raw to make light of.

In the present, Varric has returned his attention to whatever is on his desk, and Hawke finds herself counting years on fingers.  One, being born a mage, obviously.  Two, being born first, definitely a bad move.  Three...

"What are you writing now, Varric?"

"This is a good part--readers love this shit.  A character we already know and love makes a cameo to give the new main character some advice."

Hawke affords him a small approximation of a chuckle.  "Hope you can work some magic and make it out to be a little better than it was."

"Me?  Exaggerate?"

Ten, not knowing how to rip people's hearts out of their chests, or that that was even a possibility.  Eleven, not knowing any crazy demonic healing rituals that might have saved Father.  Twelve...

"Hawke?"

"Hm."

"I was asking if you'd met the Seeker yet," says Varric.  "She's a big fan."

She's seen Seeker Pentaghast in passing, but there's a deeply-ingrained part of her that still prefers to avoid heavily-armoured soldiers of the righteous.  "You'll...forgive me if I'm not wild about her.  Based, if nothing else, upon the fact that she almost had you executed a couple of times."

Varric chuckles.  "Flattered, I'm sure, but she's not so bad."

Twenty-four, that was the year she came to Kirkwall.  So twenty-five would be not seducing Varric immediately.  Though perhaps Bianca-the-person was still in the picture then, so she'd already have been  shit out of luck.  Twenty-six, not letting Mother guilt her into leaving Beth behind when she went on that blighted trip into the Deep Roads.  Twenty-six still, but she'll tack it onto twenty-seven, not bringing stupid Anders to the Deep Roads to work some of his ridiculous healing magic or something.  Twenty-eight...yes, that might have been the year.

"Varric," she begins, tentatively, "I don't suppose you remember which of my disastrous romantic entanglements occurred just after we returned from the Deep Roads?"

Varric is immediately suspicious.  "Why?"

"Just wondering," says Hawke, as lightly as she can.  "Like I said, the Kirkwall years are fuzzy.  Too much of that rat-flavoured whiskey at the Hanged Man, I'd say."

"Or," Varric counters, "you're moping because it's almost your birthday."

Hawke wrinkles her nose and focuses her attention on some of the little knick-knacks Varric has stashed about his room.  She'd like to go and investigate them, but cannot currently fathom leaving the comfort of this bed.  "Also a possibility, but I'd say it was mostly the whiskey."

Varric sighs, and, to Hawke's chagrin, abandons his writing desk entirely to come and sit next to her on his bed.  Hawke looks up at him with a defiant set to her jaw.

"It was the Rivaini then, if you insist."

Hawke slings an arm across her face.  "Right.  Right.  Oh, Maker, that was..."  A mistake.  Isabela was wonderful, and too much like Hawke, and in the beginning it had been wonderful, and then Isabela had fallen for Bethany, and then Bethany had died, and...

And they'd had a nasty falling out, and Hawke had gone to vent to Varric, and he'd said...

_Do me a favour, Hawke?_

He hadn't been looking at her, but he'd gone still, and the scratching of his quill had ceased.

_What's that?_

_Try not to beat yourself up over...I don't know, things that you could have handled better?  That stuff is...hard, you know?  Love, or whatever.  We're all just doing the best we can._

She had finally managed to focus on him then, she remembered, through bleary eyes, and she'd felt a terrible fluttering in her heart, or maybe in the pit of her stomach.

 _Have you ever been in love, Varric?_   she asked him.

 _Only..._   He paused.  _Only a couple of times_ , he said at last.

Yes, that was it.  That was the moment she loved him just a little bit.  As much as she knew how, at any rate.  As much as she'd ever loved anyone.

Still the words catch at the back of her throat.  She wants to tell him, now, years later, when she's so happy to be in his company again, and when it shouldn't matter any longer.

Varric is waiting patiently for her to say something.  She realizes belatedly she's trailed off mid-sentence.  The years on the run have not been kind to her memory.  She doesn't think she used to lose track of her thoughts so easily.

"So?" Varric prods.  "You know the rules: you ask me for a detail of your life, I get to know why you asked."

"Oh," Hawke begins lamely.  "I was..." she averts her eyes "...just thinking.  About...years.  And mistakes."

She expects Varric to chide her for dwelling as he's been doing, but he doesn't say anything, so she's forced to continue.

"I guess the good news is that I seldom make the same mistakes twice," she offers with a half-hearted smile.  "Usually I think each year came with a unique catastrophe."

It's becoming unnerving, Varric not talking.  He's always talking.  She talks a lot around people she knows already, but Varric could talk to a fence post.  She's long since lost track of the times the familiar meter of his voice coming up from somewhere in the Hanged Man was the only thing that could lull her to sleep.  Now he's gone all still and silent, waiting raptly, and his silence is somehow louder than if he'd spoken.

"Anyway, I was just..." she shrugs, attempts to disguise the growing heaviness in her voice with levity where there's little to be found, "wondering what I'd think this year's big mistake would be.  I think I've decided that the worst thing, worse than...than all the others...would be to repeat a mistake."

"Hawke..."

She's honestly hoping he has more to interrupt her with, but he falls short, and so again she is forced to continue.  Marian Hawke is many, many things, but she is no coward, and so she looks up into Varric's eyes to say it.  "I just always wished I'd confessed to you what a terrible crush I had on you once upon a time, that's all." 

But that's not all, and Hawke feels the wrongness of it twisting in her heart, and before Varric can formulate any kind of response at all, she amends, all in a rush, "And by once upon a time, I mean, I wanted to remember when it started because I wanted to know exactly how long it took me to fess up and get it over with.  I've..." 

Now that the worst of it is over, Hawke permits herself to avert her gaze once more.  She can't bear Varric's silence, or the questions in his eyes, or just looking at him and knowing she's finally told him and nothing can ever be the same.

"I've made so many mistakes, Varric," she breathes.  "But they were always the 'doing stupid things' kind, not the 'wishing-I'd done-stupid things' kind, and I know you've always had Bianca the person and Bianca the crossbow and probably a slew of other eligible ladies banging down your door, so it doesn't even matter, it's just that I had to tell you.  So you'd know.  And in case."

Varric lightly turns her head back up to face him.  "In case?" he presses.  He's...very close--closer than she remembers him being before--and suddenly the room and the blankets and her face are all very warm, and she finds herself contemplating the curve of his lips.

"In case...it wasn't quite so impossible," she manages.

"It isn't," says Varric.

"Well.  Good."

Hawke isn't certain which of them closes the distance that remains between them.  Perhaps they collide, with a glorious clatter, as with blades in battle.  It's not all that much softer than blades.  Their kisses are desperate, explosions that have waited nearly a decade to erupt, and their hands are everywhere.  Hawke has always derived considerable pleasure from loosing Varric's hair band, but this time he doesn't seem to mind her hands in his hair at all.  Concurrently, Hawke marvels at the realization of how long it's been since someone has had anything to do with her breasts.  A damn shame, really, but she thinks the heightened sensation of a many-year dry spell might be worthwhile.

...though she rather hopes it will never bear repeating.

When at last they come up for air, Hawke tells him the rest.  "It was that night I was all upset about the falling out with Isabela," she says breathlessly.  "Something about what you said to me...but I was sure you were thinking of..."

Varric chuckles, kisses her again.  "I was, a little.  Or a lot, I don't know.  If I were going to melodramatically number the years of my life in mistakes, that night would be at least three of them."

Hawke manages a real laugh at that, but it sits low and warm and soft in her chest.  "Three years of mistakes in one night?  Sounds like a typical Tuesday."

It's damn bone-chilling cold in Skyhold, and there are storms all the time, and the wind howls at the door all bloody night, but Hawke has found that Varric's bed, with Varric in it, is an excellent solution to this problem.

Sometime early in the morning, Varric slings an arm about Hawke's waist and pulls her tightly against him, and she wakes up enough to form a few fragments of conscious thought.  She wonders if maybe, this birthday, she might try numbering the years of her life in good things she's done rather than bad.

Varric wakes enough to press a kiss to her back and squeeze her just a little tighter before drifting off again.  Hawke frowns, then smiles, then relaxes and begins to drift back off into the shadowy corners of the Fade.

If she is to measure her life in good things, this night will be a marvelous place to start.


End file.
